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    'I have a sense of urgency': Sufjan Stevens wakes from the American dream

    The Oscars were an ordeal for Sufjan Stevens. “Honestly, one of the most traumatising experiences of my entire life,” the songwriter half-laughs, half-groans. The event was, he says, “a horrifying Scientology end-of-year prom” representative of “everything I hate about America and popular culture”.He had never paid much attention to them before being nominated in 2018. Mystery of Love – his bittersweet folk ballad, written for Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name – was up for best original song and Stevens had been invited to perform. His devoted fans celebrated this appearance as a moment of long-overdue mainstream recognition for the spotlight-shy then-42-year-old; 26 million viewers were watching at home, after all. But for the artist himself, shrinking into his pink-and-black striped blazer as Hollywood A-listers schmoozed around him, there was not much to celebrate. “I didn’t want to have anything to do with that world and that culture,” he says. “I don’t want to be part of any room full of adults hemming and hawing over plastic trophies.”Stevens has spent his career adjusting his work to help avoid such rooms. The Detroit-born composer is an indie household name, with St Vincent, Moses Sumney (both of whom joined him onstage at the Oscars) and the National among his peers. He has fans in hip-hop, too: Kendrick Lamar and Mac Miller have both sampled him, while in 2011, Donald Glover proclaimed himself “the only black kid at the Sufjan concert” in a verse from Fire Fly telegraphing his sensitivity. More

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    Coups, lies, dirty tricks: The Police's Stewart Copeland on his CIA agent father

    In 1986, a 69-year-old Miles Axe Copeland Jr gave a memorable interview to Rolling Stone magazine. His three sons were all music industry powerhouses – Stewart played drums in the Police, Miles III was their manager and Ian their booking agent – and Miles himself had been a jazz trumpet-player in his youth. But the interview wasn’t about music. The subject was his days as the CIA’s man in the Middle East between 1947 and 1957, during which time he dined with President Nasser of Egypt, partied with the Soviet spy Kim Philby and, as a pioneer of “dirty tricks”, played a part in removing the leaders of Syria and Iran. Inconveniently for his youngest son, he concluded the interview by implying that the Police were a psy-ops outfit who played shows to “70,000 young minds open to whatever the Police decide to put into them”.“You know it got old Sting on a bad day,” Stewart says, tickled by the memory. “He knew my father very well, and he regrets it now but he took adversely the suggestion that he was a CIA pawn.” More

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    How US K-pop fans became a political force to be reckoned with

    How US K-pop fans became a political force to be reckoned with Expect more online raids of the kind that drowned out a racist BLM backlash and humiliated Donald Trump, experts say Empty seats at Donald Trump’s rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, after K-pop fans registered for tickets with no intention of attending. Photograph: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty […] More